The Two Headlines that Tell the Entire Story of Trans Existence Right Now
(and the secret that will change the way you think about them both)
We were thirty miles west of Albuquerque when the semi-truck we’d been tailing since the state border started to lose speed, hissing to a slow stop behind a queue of cars that had just spent the better part of the afternoon passing us. Thanks primarily to a shared 300 mgs of gabapentin and the warm embrace of the Southwestern sun, the cats – Tug Boat and Submarine – didn’t even flinch when I hit the brakes, the 3 ton Airstream towing behind us shimmying only slightly as we settled to rest. My husband and I craned our necks as best we could, foreheads pressed against our windows, but it didn’t matter: the desert stretched out endless, unobstructed, and flat in every direction but the one we were headed, and there was just no way to see what was blocking our way forward.
When passable, Interstate 40 is the third largest motorist artery in the country, with 2,556 miles of road stretching across eight states: from California to North Carolina. After Albuquerque, it would snake through Amarillo, Little Rock, Memphis, and even Nashville. In the heart of Oklahoma City, the mighty I-40 balloons to more than ten lanes across. But here? The Road-Formerly-Known-As Route 66 hadn’t widened to more than two lanes since Barstow, meaning that any accident, any hiccup, any unusually large tumble weed, turned one of the busiest highways in the country into a parking lot.
A red F150 three cars ahead of us was the first to see the writing on the wall, and wasted no time swooping into the median that divided us from the I-40 West, kicking up a cloud of copper dust as he bounced across the dirt to the other side. It wasn’t long before a flurry of other vehicles joined him– a Subraru, a Prius, a Volkswagen– all approaching the severe dip of the highway’s DMZ with just a smidge more care than we’d seen from the truck. Unburdened by the need for patience, they left the rest of us in their rearview mirrors and sped back the way we’d come.
My husband and I didn’t need to talk about it. The slope bridging the divide between westbound and eastbound was too severe for us. If we attempted to follow in the parade of U-turns, it’s likely that we would buckle in the divot, stranding us in a much worse position than we were now. I shifted from D to P, resigned.
Two emergency vehicles passed us on the shoulder, sirens screaming and then fading as quickly as they appeared. Red and blue lights flickered in the distance, blending with the shimmering heat of the desert horizon. A few truckers emerged from their cabs to perch on elevated doorframes while motorists in much stumpier vehicles scampered out as far to either side of the road as they dared, arms crossed and brows furrowed as they shouted limited updates back to the air conditioned passengers they left behind.
I stretched out fingers that, until this moment, had spent the last four hours clenched tightly around a steering wheel. Across eight of them are a collection of tattooed letters, much in the same way that some tough guy bikers or old school sailors have LOVE and HATE or HOLD FAST across their gnarled, hairy fists. I got mine during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, when I was a public school teacher attempting to hold the attention of two hundred high school students a day through hour-long Zoom lectures about the literary influence of John Steinbeck. Fried, isolated, and drained from endless weeks of trying to connect with teenagers whose screens showed not much more than rows of identical ceiling fans and headboards, I’d walked into a tattoo shop on impulse and left with P-A-T-I-E-N-C-E stamped permanently onto my swollen (and largely hairless) knuckles.
Now, though the tattoo is never more than an arm’s length from my sightline, I only notice it when it feels like it’s mocking me– when trust and peace and calm are at their most distant and inaccessible.
–When I know I’m trapped.
And it wasn’t the standstill desert traffic that was making me feel that way now. No, It was a pair of headlines I’d read hours before, as we were packing up camp and the sun was beginning to crown over the Arizona mountains.
SCOTUS RULES AGAINST TRANS PEOPLE’S PASSPORT MARKERS
That was the first.
And then:
TRANS MAN HARASSED BY SECURITY AND KICKED OUT OF WOMEN’S BATHROOM IN ILLINOIS
I held both of them together in my head as I washed our dishes and made the bed. They stayed there still as I folded down our one shared table, as I rolled in our awning, as I hand-cranked the stabilizing legs of our trailer, tucking them back snug into her aluminum belly.
I tried to push them together in my mind as we loaded the last of our things into the cab of the truck and pulled onto the highway, but it was like marrying the northern end of two magnets. When they got close, they would push against each other at the last minute, protected from meeting by an invisible, irreconcilable force field.
And that’s because as inhumane and horrifying and sickening as these two headlines are on their own, they’re much, much worse together.
The first– a declaration of the Supreme Court’s intention to uphold the ban on passport marker gender changes (first ordered by the Trump administration back in January)– is disappointing but not surprising. The argument, signed, sealed, and delivered by six of the nine justices who have sworn to uphold the values and interests of a liberated nation, is that gender is immutable and unquestionably clear. In an unsigned order, the court declared that “displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth,” and that “in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.”
I thought about my own passport, tucked in a lock box beside my husband’s, both of which had been updated in a panicked frenzy on the eve of our honeymoon last year. Much like the red F150, we’d seen signs of inescapable doom and delay in the months leading up to the 2024 election, and we both sent our passports in to be updated before a single ballot was counted. Our twin Ms where there had once been Fs now felt like carrying contraband, smuggled goods beneath the floorboards. The last chopper out of ‘Nam.
The court may believe that gender is a “historical fact,” but that wouldn’t save either of us if we ever tried to use our pre-transition documentation when we needed it. Traffic stops, airports, border crossings, hotels, bars– all made not just more complicated, but downright dangerous, if either of us presented papers that declared we were actually women.
And that’s why this particular case made its way to the Supreme Court in the first place. Ashton Orr, a trans guy who was accused by airport security of holding a fake passport thanks to the little F beside his name, tried to take his case all the way to the top on behalf of us all. He is (rightfully) highlighting an issue that is going to continue to endanger thousands of trans people across the country if it isn’t addressed. They may say that Gender is Forever, but that won’t stop a terminally confused TSA agent from wondering aloud why this Government-Declared Girl Boss has a beard down to his chest and a voice like Barry White. It’s a confusion that seems counter to the purpose of a passport all together, which is to affirm that the person standing in front of you is who they say they are. If I, a trans man whose receding hairline is racing in reverse with his ass hair, tried to pass as a woman in an airport or a national border, the fallout would likely be immediate and deeply uncomfortable.
No can do, the Court says for now. You’re a girl, and there’s nothing on earth that can challenge or change that.
Enter headline number two.
At first it would seem like Lucien Bates, a trans man visiting a Round1 arcade in Illinois with his fiance, was doing exactly what six Supreme Court justices wanted of him. That is, he was using the restroom most closely aligned with his gender assigned at birth. Or, as they would say, the restroom that jives with the “historical fact” of his sex.
After using the women’s restroom (which, again, is the one we’ve been hearing for years now that conservatives want trans men to use), a security guard cornered Lucien and his fiance and demanded to see both of their IDs. He was told that what he was doing was “wrong,” and that it was dangerous for him to use that restroom as there were “children visit(ing) the facility.”
By the time he left the arcade, no fewer than seven security guards had lent a hand in his harassment, threatening him with arrest for the crime of… well, of what no one is exactly sure.
If this incident seems in direct conflict with the reasoning of the Supreme Court, that’s because it is.
And this is the point.
This is the stuck, bottled, cornered, trapped feeling that is made entirely by design.
Headlines meant to make trans people believe that there’s no correct way for them to exist are engineered to feel that way. The mistake, often, is attempting to pick apart the logic of each of these blows individually, because they aren’t logical (and especially aren’t logical together).
They are meant to make you feel like you’re swimming in circles– to fracture you from yourself.
None of this has ever been about prescribing the correct way to be trans, that if only we followed it to the letter, we would be warmly welcomed into polite society and gifted the scrumptious treat of tolerance.
No, those who wish us harm aren’t building an exit out of the labyrinth, they’re tunneling tighter and tighter turns until we run out of air. They want the reality of our lives to be a trap of contradictions and discomfort as our dignity is rubbed slowly away.
And there are few things worse than feeling trapped.
As my husband and I sat in the cab of our truck, the message on my knuckles mocking me as the sun fell lower and lower in the New Mexican sky, I remembered the last time I felt that way.
I was scuba diving in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Catalina Island, searching for a ship wreck in deep open water. By the time I realized that the sands had shifted and I was unlikely to find what I was looking for, I was way off course and something had lodged in my compass, making it impossible for me to find my bearings. I looked up, down, left, and right. In every direction was the same endless, expansive ocean, with no sign of shore. I was free, but I was trapped.
Technically, trans people are as free as anyone else. We all share the same 4.2 million miles of road across the country, and no one is telling us where we can’t go.
But that’s not how it feels.
There are thousands of us without passports, unable to acquire one that won’t endanger our lives. We think long and hard about what it will mean to use a bathroom in public. Will we be harassed? Fined? Arrested? Where can we find a doctor who will treat us? A therapist who will hear us? A teacher who will call us by our name?
We’re free, but we’re trapped.
“I have to pee.”
I looked over at my husband, our kitten Tug Boat tucked into a tight cinnamon bun curl in his lap, purring and snoozing through my existential crisis.
“What?”
“I have to pee. Like, right now.”
We hadn’t moved an inch in almost an hour. Most of the passenger cars ahead of us had long since abandoned the wait, flipping U-turns one after the other until only us and the long haul truckers remained. There was no tree coverage on either shoulder, and the nearest gas station was nine miles behind us. Up, down, left, right.
“Can you hand me the house key?”
“What?”
“The house key.”
He said it slower the second time, giving me a moment to catch up.
The house key. The house we were towing behind us. The house we bought specifically to outrun feeling trapped in our own country. The house that definitely had a bathroom in it. A bathroom with a sign stuck on the front of it reading “TRANS ONLY RESTROOM.”
That house key.
By the time he jumped back in the passenger seat with an empty bladder, our kitten happy to settle once again in the safety of his lap, the traffic began to clear. We were closer to the front of the line than we realized, and we craned our necks as we passed what looked like a minor cargo fire that had since been put out and shoved to the shoulder.
Everything ends eventually, I thought. It can’t last forever.
I wonder sometimes if I have to think that, or if trusting in the cycles of the universe will one day let me down. There have been moments over the last year where my husband and I have had serious conversations about leaving the country entirely. Would life for us be that different somewhere like Mexico? Or Canada? Maybe, but we wouldn’t be able to outrun everything.
Sometimes it’s harder to accept that turning around isn’t an option, that there isn’t a better, painless choice waiting for us. Trusting cycles isn’t about surrendering to the whims of the world, but about accepting the hard feelings of our present circumstances. It’s often shitty and difficult, but it’s not impossible. The question for now is: how do we cope? How do we sit in the contradictions and indignities of this present moment? How do we hold our breath through a tunnel when we can’t see the end? How do we last long enough to find it again?
This won’t end with a neatly packaged answer. I’m not going to tell you that the secret is positive thinking, or voting, or phone banking, or school board meetings, or yoga, or waking up at sunrise to watch hot air balloons drift over the Rio Grande (though that last one is the fucking best, I will say). The answer is messy, and it’s not going to be the same for all of us.
What’s universally true is this: we have to make it.
We have to.
Resisting means knowing that what they are telling us isn’t true.
We know how to be us, no one else.
They will continue to block our way forward, to crowd the field with contradictions meant to disempower us and make us feel small, but there is always something we can do. We can fight, and we can wait, and we can outlast them all.
And we will. We always will.
Thank you for this. I similarly wrote on the double bind we are in this week: https://open.substack.com/pub/queerresilience/p/unpopular-opinion-what-if-we-stopped?r=17qnxh&utm_medium=ios
This is so well done. Thank you 🙏🏽